The evening commenced with a short video on the entertainment industry produced by CNBC's Auradha Sengupta, Anita Balagopalan and Naomi. The video rattled off statistics from various researches.

For starters, the Indian film industry produces more than 1000 celluloid films every year. In 2001, the entertainment industry in India was estimated to be around Rs. 128 billion ($2.5 billion - a FICCI-Arthur Andersen estimate). In terms of total revenues in 2001, the size is Rs. 94 billion of which TV broadcasting accounted for Rs. 36 billion.

In 2002, the entertainment industry was growing at a rate ahead of the GDP. In fact, it is one of the few industries which continue to do well even in a recession economy.

KPMG's entertainment business head Rajesh Jain who came up next to throw in some light on the numbers related to the entertainment business, revealed that the largest chunk - the television pie constituted 62 percent - whereas films were 34 percent of the entire chunk in 2002. He added that the mass television channels genre had decreased from 75 percent to 55 percent. The news channels continued to do well.

He also added that the home entertainment industry in the US markets had witnessed the maximum growth from 40 percent to 60 percent. In India, however, it was exhibiting a slightly weaker growth of 20 percent. He added that the live entertainment sector was also witnessing a greater amount of activity along with gaming and online lotteries.

IDBI chairman and managing director P.P. Vora mentioned that 40 films out of the total of 130 films in 2002 belonged to the A category and 15 producers had made profits in excess of Rs 58 crores. There were more than 32 listed companies in film production.

Reliance Entertainment chairman Amit Khanna was emphatic that the Indian film industry shouldn't be identified with the Hindi film industry as the total spend on Hindi films was just 40 percent of the entire moviemaking stake and 35 percent of the box-office stake.

Khanna added that the entertainment industry was a unique one because all its assets were regenerative in nature. The assets can be re-exploited themselves time and again whenever newer media are introduced. He also mentioned that the residual value of the entertainment assets could last up to 60 years as per copyright norms and they continued to remain a valued business proposition.

Khanna also mentioned that the current financial year was not as bad it looked as the industry had grown by 22 percent in the first three quarters of the financial year. He stated that the growth rate compared favourably with that of the IT sector. He also mentioned that the film industry's growth was 11 percent year-on-year.

Khanna also calculated that 11,000 odd theatres in India with an average seating capacity of 700 seats indicated a total of 35 million viewing audiences per day and a revenue of Rs 46 billion. He also added that 15 million people watched Indian films every day.

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